by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright May 2010
Iron Man 2 was better than I expected. It was better because of the wonderful chemistry between the actors, not because it had so many battle scenes.
The good part of this movie was the acting. I thought all the actors did a fine job. The battle scenes were OK, too, so they didn't get in the way.
Here are some technofiction problems I noticed:
o The speed with which Tony Stark's blood is getting poisoned. First off, the explanation of why it was getting poisoned didn't work for me. Palladium is nothing special as an element, so it shouldn't have been that hard to contain it. Likewise, whatever super element Tony invented in the last half should have been intensely radioactive, which meant it wasn't going to last long, and should have been a lot harder to contain than palladium. And, finally, this inventing was part of that Hollywood tradition of playing fast and loose with time and space that always grinds me.
o Closely related to this first problem, the problem Tony has in telling Pepper what's going on. This makes no sense because she can't plan well if she's in the dark.
o And yet another closely related issue: Tony can't think of anything better to do for his final birthday party than get drunk as a skunk in his Iron Man suit? My goodness! He can do the drunk as a skunk business anytime! It's another sad Hollywood plot device.
o Finally we move on. When his friend, James Rhodes, commandeers the other suit, this demonstrates not only the military but the terrorist potential of these suits. There should have been a lot more rogue operator security built in much earlier in the development program.
o The briefcase suit that is used at Monaco was neat CGI, but it opened a big can of worms in terms of what these suits can do. This is as bad as creeping transporter technology is in the Star Trek franchise, and I predict it's going to bite this series' internal consistency hard.
o And while we are at Monaco: Those Formula One race cars have more telemetry than NASA satellites -- as soon as there's trouble on the track, every driver hears about. They would all slow down and stop as soon as Vanko first wanders on the course.
o Moving on from Monaco, the Justin Hammer character bothered me. Sam Rockwell did first-rate weasel, but he never convinced me he had enough competence to become a CEO. I kept wondering, "How did he get to be CEO of this company?"
o It bothered me that both Stark and Vanko could invent stuff in minutes rather than years. On the other hand, I loved the inventing scenes. Those were pure pleasure to watch.
o Relating to that, the mysterious way the father, Howard Stark, passed on the final clue to solving the poisoning power source problem didn't work for me. It was cute, but way too contrived for me to suspend belief on. The utility of breakthrough engineering is way too hard to convince people of, even in the best of circumstances. Doing something cute like this would insure that some other bright inventor would get credit for this discovery from some independent line of research.
o Finally, there was no effort by Stark to move the final climactic battle away from populated areas. When the police arrest Justin Hammer at the end of the battle, they should have been arresting everyone on the scene from both Hammer and Stark industries just to be on the safe side.
And that's what I have for you. It was a fun movie for the acting chemistry, and I enjoyed that a lot. But the Technofiction holes are pretty standard for a summer comic book movie.
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